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The latest crime-reduction strategy to come out of Surrey, it seems, is deforestation.

Mayor Dianne Watts has mused that to foil criminal activity in parts of Newton, and to throw light on shady dealings, some of the neighbourhood’s heritage evergreen trees might have to come down. If they can’t catch the bad guys in the act of doing bad things, the reasoning goes, at least they can blow their cover.

This would be the first time in B.C. where clear-cut logging is seen in a good light. Pruning will pass for police work.

It would be funny if it weren’t inspired by horror. Julie Paskall, a mother waiting outside the Newton Arena to pick her son up after a hockey game, is brutally beaten and murdered. The attack is so violent and so anomalous to the usual gang- and drug-related murders that Surrey endures that it left its citizenry stunned.

Gang murders are one thing — let the thugs weed out their own. But a hockey mom? Her death seemed like some awful rite of passage for the city. Surrey’s sheen of suburban dynamism evaporated overnight. And in the inevitable wake of press conferences that followed Paskall’s death, the once-untouchable mayor looked not just ineffectual for the first time in her political career, but shaken. Meanwhile, the local RCMP — whose Newton detachment was less than two blocks from the arena — proceeded to play catch-up, tuning up the usual suspects and raiding neighbourhood crack houses.

It should be noted that Surrey is home to the country’s largest RCMP detachment.

As of 2012, the provincial Ministry of Justice’s listing of municipal police resources had Surrey’s detachment strength at 661 officers, with a municipal support staff of 250. The next-largest RCMP detachment in the province is Burnaby’s, with 299 officers, followed by Richmond’s, with 217.

It would seem like a lot of manpower Surrey has at its disposal, and it would be, if it were any other city.

But Surrey is huge, and riven by class, ethnicity and suburban sprawl. Its demographics skew younger than established communities like Vancouver or Richmond, and crime is a young man’s game. Its population is also growing faster than its police force. City Hall hasn’t kept up.

Consider that, as of 2012, about 485,000 people lived in Surrey. On a per-capita basis, there were 731 citizens for every officer.

Compare that to Vancouver — which Surrey hopes to soon displace as the province’s largest and most-important city.

Vancouver’s municipal police force has a strength of 1,327 officers for a population of just under 670,000. That works out to 504 citizens for every police officer.

Look, too, at what the two cities pay for their policing.

The total cost of policing in Surrey in 2012, according to the justice ministry’s figures, was $113,077,663 — or a cost per capita to its citizens of $234.

In Vancouver, the cost of policing was $244,359,114, or a per-capita cost of $366, more than 50 per cent higher than in Surrey.

One result: The case load in Surrey was almost twice that of the case load in Vancouver. And the crime rate has fallen much more precipitously in Vancouver than it has in Surrey.

“I think it is fair to say,” said Rick Parent, associate professor of Simon Fraser University’s police studies program, “that Surrey is somewhat unique in the RCMP world, and in the Vancouver suburb world. Surrey is rapidly growing with several dynamics leading the change — more young people than other areas, more diverse ethnic groups, and individuals that tend to be less wealthy than those in Vancouver. Yet Surrey is destined to overtake Vancouver.

“Thus, these unique issues are suggestive of (the need for) a higher police ratio than other detachments and, I would suggest, higher than the number currently allotted. The taxpayers in Surrey are paying less than neighbouring Delta for their policing. I would suggest that they need to hire more RCMP officers and deploy their individuals on the street (not behind the desk) due to the dynamics that I mentioned.”

In other words, you get what you pay for.

In the wake of the Paskall murder, an angry citizenry will make a lot of demands of its police. And it should.

But Surrey isn’t the suburb it used to be. It’s a big city with big-city problems. It’s a big city with dreams of being even bigger.

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